Quote:
Originally Posted by Stormcrow
Now suppose they've done that. A year or two goes by. Time Use Forms are filled out. Players want to play in the Viking world again. The king in the south calls for men to go a-viking. The same player characters can now be used in a totally new campaign: sail to Britain and start plundering. Assuming the characters don't winter in Britain or try to form a settlement, the campaign ends when viking season is over and they go home.
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I can see how that might work, but it assumes a very different situation from what mine was. To start with, it seems to assume that "players" is a single group about the right size for a single campaign. But over a span of close to 25 years, I always had enough interested players to run two campaigns in parallel, and often three. And rather than players A-E always being in one campaign, and players P-T in another, and players W-Z in a third, I would end all three campaigns at the same time, and a bit before then, I would hand around a list of campaign proposals, and run campaigns that got a lot of votes, and assign players to campaigns they rated high. I did have one group of players with fairly similar tastes, but there was always some turnover with each new cycle; it was never exactly the same groups.
Also, I was always the one who was suggesting possible new campaigns; it was never a case of "the players have asked for a campaign in this setting." I could come up with far more ideas for campaigns than I could ever have time to run. My longest list had, I think, fifty suggested campaigns!
I did run a second campaign in Transhuman Space, a setting I really liked, but it had none of the same characters, and its theme was quite different.
So as a result, I don't worry about where experience will take characters in five or ten years, or in a few hundred sessions. A typical two-year campaign has 24 monthly sessions, which comes to maybe 50-100 points gained. And on that scale, the typical GURPS progression rate works fine.